Art Meets Science: “Beyond Resolution”
The challenging relationship between art and science is the basis for the Art Meets Science program at MDI Biological Laboratory. How does an artist experience the scientific process? How does the artistic mind use the findings and discoveries of scientific experiments? Artists and scientists strive to grasp the world around us, with the hopes of understanding nature and its complex patterns and mechanisms. Both scientists and artists grapple with the problem to visualize what they discover — how to bridge the gap between knowledge and communication.
How Do We Visualize What We Cannot See?
Artist Michael Takeo Magruder spent a year collaborating with MDI Bio Lab, immersing himself in scientific research, exchanging ideas with scientists, and exploring their questions and methods. In turn, he used his own artistic approach to create thought-provoking works that challenge and inspire. Art and Science, Art about Science, or Art in Science?
From the start, Michael was captivated by the advanced imaging techniques used at MDI Bio Lab, a leader in microscopy and research on tissue regeneration and blood vessel formation. Our scientists shift the frontiers of visibility by building cutting-edge microscopes, allowing previously unseen structures to be revealed and thereby developing an understanding of biological mechanisms.
Michael worked alongside the explorers of the microscopic world at MDI Bio Lab. He translated and transformed their methods and their findings into his world of technology and art. The artwork in this exhibition is the result of his artistic journey, showing the outcome of his experiments, how he visualizes his findings, and how artwork communicates an artistic analysis of scientific data and methodology. His art confronts us with other ways to see the world. It makes us reflect on our experiments, challenges our assumptions, and sheds new light on the scientific endeavor.
— Hermann Haller, M.D., President, MDI Biological Laboratory
“Beyond Resolution is an exhibition by British-American visual artist Michael Takeo Magruder exploring the commonalities and emergent possibilities that reside at the intersection of art and science. It represents the culmination of the artist’s year-long residency at MDI Biological Laboratory and showcases the creative outcomes of his collaborative exchanges with the institute’s distinguished scientific community.
The focus of the exhibition is two newly commissioned artworks produced using the leading-edge systems of the Laboratory’s Light Microscopy Facility. Each work is generated from actual scientific research data that has been transformed using Artificial Intelligence (AI) models and techniques derived from contemporary digital arts practice. These aesthetic processes render spatial and temporal details that extend beyond the hard limits of traditional imaging technologies, allowing viewers to peer beyond the horizons offered by even today’s most advanced microscopes.
On the one hand, using AI in this fashion is cutting edge. On the other, it taps into a long history of artistic, philosophical, and scientific speculation — from the Latin verb specere, meaning to look at or see. During the 15th century, Renaissance masters including Piero della Francesca, Paolo Uccello, and Leonardo da Vinci utilized mathematical calculations of linear perspective to create newly realistic masterpieces. In the 17th century, the philosopher René Descartes published extensively on the nascent science of optics, while the philosopher Baruch Spinoza made his living as an accomplished lens grinder for microscopes and telescopes. And it was Galileo’s practical advances in telescope design that enabled his astronomical discoveries.
By using AI to imagine what lies beyond the present limits of microscopy, Michael challenges scientists to step back from the bench, as it were, and consider possibilities they have not yet observed. There is an intrinsic risk to speculating about the unseen — just think of market speculation — but in the hands of committed scientists, risk can be responsible, indeed indispensable. Scientific speculation continually seeks the balance of confirmation, turning projection to validation. What Michael has generated may be beyond resolution today, but not for long.”
— Professor Aaron Rosen, Ph.D. (Cantab)
